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If there's ever a woman who's smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don't write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them.

The imaginative leap for me of writing for women is no more difficult than the one of writing for men. I've always wanted to have women well represented in the work that I've done because I've always been around them and around the way they look at the world.

When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?'

I'm not an especially male novelist, but I think men are better at writing about men, and the same is true for women. Reading Saul Bellow is a revelation, but he can't write women. There are exceptions, like Marilynne Robinson's 'Gilead,' but generally, I think it's true.

I love writing about men. To get by in the world you have to know how men think. Not that all guys think alike, but women tend to think about more things at the same time, an overgeneralization, but I find it easier to make my male characters focus than I do my female characters.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

I think there have always been male writers, female writers. As a reader, I never picked up a book and said, 'Oh, I can't read this - it's about a male,' and set it back down.

I've been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it's pretty equal. I don't know why that is. It's been the same thing for a while. It's hard for female comedians to stand out. That's weird. That's a shame.

I think women do write politically all the time. Margaret Atwood does; Doris Lessing does.